The House of Representatives will be voting on a bill that would extend the NSA’s warrantless wiretap program for another 5 years.
Congress passed the FAA (FISA Amendments Act) in 2008, in effect legalizing President Bush’s controversial warrantless wiretap program. Four years later, we know almost nothing about how the FAA has been implemented or about the scope of the surveillance that’s being conducted under the Act.
And what we do know raises serious concerns…
· the NSA intercepts 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other communications every single day (Washington Post, 7/19/2010)
· the NSA says it cannot even give a rough estimate of the number of Americans whose communications have been swept up (Wired.com, 6/18/2012)
· the NSA has reportedly overstepped the bounds of this very lax law, intercepting private emails and phone calls of Americans illegally (New York Times, 4/16/2009)
· all those communications are stored on a searchable database, allowing the government to get information on specific Americans without any suspicion that they have committed a crime (Huffington Post, 9/6/2012)
In spite of these concerns and others, Congress wants to reauthorize the program without adding any safeguards or doing any oversight!
It’s a disgrace.
At the very least, before considering legislation to reauthorize the FAA, Congress should require the government to specify the nature and extent of this illegal surveillance and in any reauthorization legislation, Congress should impose statutory mechanisms to ensure that illegal surveillance does not recur under the FAA umbrella.
( From UFPJ member group, Defending Dissent Foundation )